TIMMINS — An annual Mother's Day getaway sisters Denise Didone and Louise Seguin turned out to be a life saver for a man they saw at the side of a bush road being mauled by a 400-pound black bear.

The sisters decided to camp with the girls just outside Cochrane, and were looking forward to a relaxing weekend.

But when they returned from a trip into town for supplies, they saw Joe Azougar fighting off a 400-pound black bear.

“I grabbed my sister's leg and said ‘look a bear’,” said Seguin said. “It was one of the biggest bears I’d ever seen and it was on all fours over something and it was thrashing around.”

At first Didone thought Azougar was "a trash bag or something."

“Then we saw the leg and the foot, and I turned to my sister and said, ‘Hit the horn,” Didone said.

The bear, distracted by the approaching vehicle, had let up on its attack.

As Didone moved towards Azougar, she shouted at him to use the strength he had left to reach their van.

“He collapsed back down, and I knew I had to get him moving because he is a very big man and there was no way my sister and I would have been able to get him into the van.”

What followed was a frantic 13-kilometre drive to the hospital in Cochrane.

“We saw it, we saw the shape he was in," Didone said. "A big piece of his scalp was hanging off. His shoulder was torn to pieces and his clothes had almost completely been torn off,” she said. “He is a strong man ... and he wouldn’t have survived the way that he did if it hadn’t been for his will to live, because he fought that bear tooth and nail.”

Azougar recounted the fight for his life in an interview on Saturday.

“He knocked me down and I covered my head, he took my shoulder apart,” Azougar told QMI Agency. “He ... then he peeled the skin off my head and started biting my skull. I could feel his teeth against my skull.

“I jammed my thumb in his eye and so he went back to my shoulder.”

Despite Azougar’s efforts, the bear continued the attack.

“The women that saved me, no I don’t know them. If you meet them, you thank those angels for me,” he said. “They are my angels, without them, I wouldn’t be alive.”

The sisters visited Azougar in hospital Monday.

“We had been worrying for two days about this man,” Seguin said. “We knew that we had to see him, to see that he was alright, especially considering the state we’d left him in at the hospital.”

Azougar is recovering at Lady Minto Hospital, his torn flesh held together with 300 stitches.

“He was smiling, he was happy,” Didone said. “Obviously, he has morphine to help with the pain, but he just kept calling us angel one and angel two. He kept thanking us over and over again.

“We didn’t fight the bear off, we just scared it and did what we could,” Didone said. “We aren’t heroes, we just did what we could, what we would have done for anyone.”

The bear responsible for attacking Azougar and killing his dog was destroyed.

“We had a tough couple of days,” Didone said. “We didn’t know what to do with ourselves. But now that we’ve seen that he is recovering, we know that he is going to be OK and we can begin to be OK too.”